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Hello and welcome to decoder. I'm Hank Green. I'm a science guy. I help run an educational media company called Complexly, and I'm also a big fan of this podcast. I am not, however, the editor in chief of the verge, but Niela Patel is, and decoder is Niela's show about big ideas and other problems. One of those problems is that one of the best possible guests for decoder is unfortunately also the host of decoder.
So while we get to hear a lot of Niela's thoughts on a lot of this stuff, when I listen to this podcast, I often think, man, I would like to hear Niela interviewed on his own podcast. And so I went on to threads, and I made that joke, and Niela responded, let's do it. And so now this is it. We are doing it. Niela has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he is going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean?
While I was busy building my business on other people's platforms, Niela has built something very rare in the year 2024, a website that publishes content and isn't behind a paywall, yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is the verge structured? The tables have turned.
You'll also hear Niela try to convince me that the Fediverse isn't just happening, but that it's also going to be important and that we should be paying attention to it, and that it is going to make the internet better. And I think I maybe even got a Fediverse-related verge scoop in here. One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just like a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet,
that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And then Niela told me, no, that's wrong. It's not people who are doing that. It's the systems that deliver that content to people. A distinction that I'm going to be thinking about for a long, long time.
He won't say it, of course, so I will. Niela is a defining voice of this very bizarre moment in the history of media, and his leadership and strategy have proved that content can win, especially when you stop chasing every shiny object that platelets. And you're trying to find a shiny object that platforms place in front of you and think instead about your audience first. Alright, Niela Patel, Editor in Chief of the Verge, let's do it.
Niela Patel, you are Editor in Chief of the Verge and co-founder of the Verge and co-host of the Vergecast, and of course, host of decoder most days. But this one, Niela, welcome to decoder. This is terrifying. I want to be very clear to the audience. I'm in peril. That's how this feels. It's funny when I first proposed this, you're like, this is amazing because it's so much harder to host than to be interviewed. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to have to do a bunch of work on this.
Whereas when you interviewed me, I just like showed up. Now you're just showing up. Now you get to feel though. You get to feel what it's like. Literally my way into the studio. I thought to myself, how do I make decisions? What's our org chart? Yeah, well, get ready because those questions are coming. I'm super excited about this. This is very cool. It's very cool that we get to do this.
You think a lot and have a lot of good ideas and talk to a lot of people about, I think, things that are very present suddenly more present now than they have been the Internet. It feels like it's been tossed up out of the air and we could see it all fall down and see where it lands a little bit.
It's an election year. That's awful. I hate those. And there's just a lot of a lot of reasons to be thinking about the kinds of things you think about right now. So I'm really glad to get to talk to you. But let's start about you being the person who runs the last website on Earth. Because you say things all the time and they don't explain them, which I love. But now I've got you. And so you have to explain to me why the verge is quote unquote the last website on Earth.
It's a little bit of a joke. It's 50% a joke. I'm aware that there are other websites. What I specifically mean is we were founded in a boom time of websites. We were founded in 2011. We started talking at the site in 2010. We remain part of a venture-backed digital media startup. There were a lot of those back then. We had a lot of competition in 2011. Meaningful, like, we were scared of them competition. Read right web existed. And we tried to beat them every day.
TechCrunch was a very different kind of publication back then. We tried to beat them all the time. And I really respect the people I competed against. I came up at Engaget competing ferociously against the people at Gizmodo. And we became first rivals and then really good friends out of that competition.
Some of those sites still exist. Some of them are still doing great work. Some of them still have great people. But that moment when there was a ferocious rush of energy and money and attention into websites has obviously faded. We're not making those the same way we used to anymore. And then I look at my peer group. And so many of them are gone.
And so that to me, there's like a it's that it's all the things that the people and the properties that I used to wake up in fear of. Many of them are radically different than they used to be. And we're still here. And that feels strange to me.
It feels strange. It you won and it's like, oh, I don't actually like it turns out that when you put into the arena and you're the last man standing, there's just like a lot of carnage around which isn't that much of a triumph. It feels like it hurts a little bit. It's weird to to be us our age and hear that the word website feels almost anachronistic. It feels of another era.
The way I think about it is that I don't have anyone else's algorithm to think about and that is really important to me. But then I look at all of the most important creators and the most influential members, the new media. And what they are so successful that they have transcended algorithms on other people's platforms. So I'll just point to Mark has brownie who I think is an amazing reviewer and great tech YouTuber. He has transcended the YouTube algorithm.
And that has afforded him a kind of success that a lot of people are frankly joss of sometimes I'm joss of it. But I never think about YouTube and I'm very happy with never really thinking about YouTube in that way. I think there's a tension there where that's what the website for you. If you can build an audience for the website, but building an audience for a website is almost impossible.
You have also said that you are going to revolutionize the media with blog posts. This is a similar sentence in that we are also referring to an anachronistic thing almost in the form of blog post. But we're going to move forward by moving backward a little bit somehow. What do you mean when you say that? I'm going to make you explain yourself.
I say we're going to revolutionize the media with blog post all the time. That is a joke that we started making about our redesign on the verge.com where we added these things called quick posts that just let us post more more frequently.
And it is all tied to that notion of just fighting back against the pressures of an algorithm that the platform world. Yeah. And the last platform on the web of any scale or influence is Google search. And so over time, web pages have become dramatically optimized for Google search.
And that means a kinds of things people write about the containers that we write in are mostly designed to be optimized for Google search. They're not designed for I need to just quickly tell you about this and move on.
And so our little insight was, well, what if we just like don't do that? What if we only write for the people come directly to our website instead of the people who find our articles through search or Google discover or whatever other Google platforms are in the world. And so we just made these little blog posts. And the idea was if you just come to our website one more time a day because there's one more thing to look at that you like.
And I think if you look around the media landscape right now, we did that a year or so ago more and more people are starting to realize we should just like make the websites more valuable and the easiest way to make the websites more valuable is to have our talented people make more stories. And not just like more stories, but like have more like openly have more fun on the website.
Business insiders doing that semaphores doing that in other ways. And that's what I mean is like, oh, if you start writing for other people, which is the heart of what a blog post really is like it's you trying to entertain yourself and trying to entertain just a handful of other people. You're going to go really much farther than trying to satisfy the robot.
And I feel like there was a time like when blog posts were first a thing when it was very sort of like I have a blog. This is me and I have this relationship with my audience. And there was a lot of like you know there's snark and there was creativity and I see this tossed in with stuff at the verge today that that influence still sort of like comes through.
It feels like and like I struggle with this as a youtuber and you know like that's this sort of transcendent transcending the algorithm kind of thing. It feels like the way to do that is to have a community not just like numbers not just views not just impressions but like humans who you have a relationship with somehow. How do you imagine those people? Let me answer that question two different ways.
You're touching on something that we talk about a lot people might have heard Casey Newton get at this in the last time he was on the show. It's pretty easy to get traffic in the world. You can go and tick-tock today and get some traffic and get some views. It is really hard to build an audience.
And I think a lot of the destruction we see in the media community right now is no one built an audience they try to get traffic and then they try to sell that traffic and they assume the traffic would less forever. And they just have no incentives to let you keep having traffic forever and they absolutely do not have incentive for you to have so much audience that you get leverage over the platforms right such that they might have to pay you higher.
This seems very destructive like I it seems very to like destructive to the media ecosystem like that that thing that you just articulated there doesn't seem like a little deal seems like a big deal. I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realize that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators.
I'm curious for your read on sort of the number of YouTubers that you see kind of retiring or taking a step back. It just feels like eventually hit a point where like there's nothing left here for me. It's just me like I have to just extract more from myself and put it on this platform every day to succeed and that stops being valuable.
Whereas I think if you were able to build a company or a brand or institution at the end of that you're like well I made this yeah maybe I can sell it maybe I could just let some other people run it maybe it stands for something maybe we shut it down and ever talk about how much they missed it. But it's more it's more than you and I think the platforms are not organized economically to ever allow that to happen because that is expensive and you can replace individuals all the time.
Yeah you can and also it seems like people have an easier time trusting individuals now than then trusting larger brands. So it's sort of oh I totally disagree with that. I think that's like your platform build I totally disagree. Like in the biggest most serious ways that I can possibly think of. The platforms are designed to create that idea and reinforce it they want they want that to be true they want to say people don't trust brands they trust people and that the brand stands for nothing.
And that's because when you shove a brand into the same incentive structure as a group of individuals an infinite supply of teenagers who will work for free. The brands to base themselves and now the brands are worth nothing. But you know what like all the celebrities still want to be on the cover of magazines.
Like they they want the validation that the big brand the institution can provide and there's a reason for that because the brand stands for more than just an individual opinion or at least it it's best it does. There are a lot of problems with that I my little blog that people now think of as an institution started out in opposition to big magazines like we were the upstarts. And so I feel that tension all the time.
But I think the idea that people trust people more than brands is a creation of the algorithmic media environment it is not the natural result of people getting smarter or becoming savior media consumers. That's just the water we're going to stare at my ceiling tonight and think about this because I've never heard anyone even make the case. That that is and I get it the version is a collective right it's a group of individuals will make something together.
And that means when we go to play on a platform that is organized around someone talking to you like a tick tocker Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts or whatever. It's a different person every time that stands in for this other thing but if you look at the cover of vogue this month is like all of the vogue legends like all the icons and like Oprah is in the center of that picture and it's all of these super models like around Oprah.
And it's like no tick tocker can create that moment only an institution can create that moment and that the moment has to provide value back to all of those people right you're on the cover of vogue with all these other people so interesting well what does that come from that doesn't come from any individual that comes from yeah and Vogue being Vogue and Vogue is like making it work kind of in a way that a lot of magazines are but before we get to magazines is I want to talk about this is a good time to ask Neal I how is the verge struck.
How is the verge structure. The verge is structure. This is tough. I have like a real answer and then a philosophical answer you're ready for this I'm glad you're ready for the question I had to think about this a lot. So we are structured in two ways or two organizing principles of which were structured by topics we have desks we have a policy desk we have a transportation desk we have a reviews department like.
That's like topic expertise subject matter expertise is where is one set of organizing principles then we're also structured by format right so we have like a news team we have a features team reviews I think bridges the gap right you need to be a subject matter expert in laptops and then reviews are particular kind of format so those are the kind of the two ways and we have teams that kind of address each of those buckets and they all work together we we try to make sure our team is constantly.
And then we are going to be able to do something that is constantly moving across formats and desk because I think we're at our best when the things collide. But the real way that we're organized is by cadence what and that is actually like a very difficult thing to explain and you can't actually say that out loud what do you mean cadence.
So our news team operates in 20 minute increments they wake up the news hits it goes on the website they're done they move on to the next thing if you want a piece of analysis you've got a scoop and you to build it out. So we have a couple of days a feature might take a year or view might take a week and a half a video might take two months so we have all these we have all these systems that kind of organize those cadences of work.
So that they can get the appropriate amount of focus they can also be finished because the hardest thing is to like finish what you're working on and be like okay we're publishing it now. So the news team everything is always finished like it's finished before it started like the news has occurred you know for the features team it's like is it done.
And we don't everything we need to do that we set the deadline like did the people respond to is a gone through legal review like there's all these things that prevent you from being finished we try to give things space to be finished on their timeline. So we see how if you just stare at the structure of the verge long enough you can see how it's mostly organized around those cadences and then all the other things just allow sort of like minded people to work together.
How many people are those people. I think right now we're about 50 I might be wrong about that actually we're hiring so I don't know we have some people coming in so we're growing in fits and starts again which is exciting. Has has the things been good since the redesign I love the redesign it was very exciting my first day I was like this is just like on the edge of being too weird.
Where like my brain isn't quite sure what to do but I like on the first day I feel like I know how to use this website and on the 10th day I'm like I know how to use this website. We've actually changed too much to fast we dialed it back a little bit and now we're starting to reintroduce some of those other changes but the core piece of it which is are we making our own website the most valuable place that we work.
Has been wildly successful to the point where I'm sometimes like we're doing too many quick posts. We should we should make longer things again. I think that's a good sign because my number one goal in this is remember this is pre-ealon my number one goal was boy I'd like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts.
I should be asking that question of myself like why am I writing the text box that that pays money to Elon and Mark and not my. Why do we all work for free? This is like we want to talk about the platform era and media why do we all work for free everybody's insisting I don't know the answer we can't shut up about how our work has value but then we can't stop giving it away for free.
Yeah fuck you pay me he typed free recently for free into another box like it's very confusing and there's a lot of reasons if you just sit back and think about why there's a million reasons why one the software is nicer to use than most CMS's. It doesn't he just pick one name a company that makes a CMS like is this is fun to use as Twitter and the answer is no.
Yeah, flatly no even though one we have now for a quick post is not as fun to use as Twitter was in a day. Well this immediately bring me the dopamine hit of immediate feedback. No. I just want my little cookie and my little cookie is people being mean to me. Yeah. Yeah, well someone just tell us well someone will fully misinterpret this joke let's find out the answers yes.
Is there like a fake revenue stores like a creator fund here that will make me believe that there's like of course possible are there people here are actually making real money. Right which in on YouTube in particular I think is like YouTube has figured out monetization in a way that feels the healthiest and most stable. But there's also the haves and have nots and I think that the YouTube loves having the haves because it provides the infinite incentive to have nots.
None of that is true on a regular media company's website. None of that if you started a word press site tomorrow none of that would be true but you're press site. But the first instinct was let's at least make it easier to publish like let's at least remove the barriers to entry to getting on the website. And then we can do comments and then we can think about how we can distribute in different ways. So that is working like my team is happier we did not know that the Twitter thing would happen.
But the Twitter thing happened in our desire to publish in the boxes we controlled went up is a group and then on top of it our audience saw that we were having fun. Yeah and once you are having fun anywhere on the internet people sort of gravitate to you and that the sort of traffic is going to. We need to take a quick break when we come back Nila and I discuss how to build an audience in the age of platforms and also how the verge actually makes money.
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This is Hank Green guest host of decoder and we're back with the verge editor in chief Neelie Patel about building audiences on the internet and how to turn that into a profitable business. That goes back to the conversation we're having before about audience and how do you imagine those people like who are they in your head and how do you feel like you understand them.
This is a huge thing for me I think about all the time our mission statement is that the verge is a website about how technology makes people feel. We've kind of narrowed it down we've had heavier ones we have ones that were designed for advertisers. We've had ones that are like we're about the future and like over time it's like oh no we're just about how this makes you feel. It is a very emotional website about cell phones and that means we can be expansive.
It means we can validate the fact that people are having emotional experiences with their technology. One of the things I say all the time is I can go up to anyone in the world and ask them about their phone and they will tell me a story because they have an emotional relationship with this piece of technology that mediates almost all of their other relationships.
There's something they love there's something they're frustrated about there's something they wish was better and you just if you can ask the right questions everyone has a story to tell you about their phone.
That is a pretty massive set of things to think about so I think of our audience is people who want to feel those feelings like they want to love things they want to dislike things they want to be passionate about these objects these screens that literally mediate almost everything else that happens in our lives.
I think we poke at that pretty hard all the time and it we're never punished for thinking too hard about things and that to me is like the sure sign that we've at least found a group of people that are stable that over time can grow because it's kind of fun to be smart.
So I think people they they latch onto that and they evangelize how they feel to their friends and then the audience grows again and again yeah I feel like telling Hank Green it's fun to be smart is like one of the funniest things like I truly do not have to condense you of that it turns out I do agree with this and also that it's a great it's a great principle from which to build an audience because of course you get the audience that you build for you know you you could lots of ways to have lots of different audiences but it's always better if you're building an audience.
That you're actually like hanging out with and your Apple Vision Pro coverage like I'm a guy who doesn't care at all about the Apple Vision Pro maybe I should but I did care about how much you all cared about it and like just this sort of like college dorm room I can't believe we've just spent this much time thinking about the difference 26 and a seven kind of coverage of the Apple Vision Pro is like I don't care about this piece of tech at all but I care about these doofs they're great.
And I think that you're doing that in a really good way once you have that audience and you have this website how do you turn at the verge that into money. We are very precious about how we turn things into money and I think this has helped us is almost entirely helped us it has hurt us in one particular way which is we don't make as much money as influencers do. I can talk about why that is such an expensive brand deal I was so mad my system was like it's okay Hank I'm like it's not okay.
Yeah I can't believe I'm doing this. So we say no to all of them right so this is the real hard thing but the main way we make money is we sell advertising center we sell ads and we sell display ads in our website banners and boxes we have some ideas on how to make those experiences better. We sell ads in the podcast I don't read them.
I know not as little as if I did read them yeah we saw ads you know we have you to pre-roll with their sponsored content on the website it's a big disclosures but there's like the advertiser content on our website. So all the ways that media companies make money except the way that individual creators make a lot of money which is directly making the brand deals for our talent so I don't know the podcast ads most podcasters just read the ads.
We will not stop a YouTube video in the middle and let any of our journalists do the brand read or whatever we have somebody else who does that which is Andrew Melzack he's great he's. He's part of advertising team he does them he's very good at them it's great but someone else doesn't and so that we just maintain and enforce this distance between our workers journalists and what advertisers would like us to say and I think that is.
Again many youtubers are very very successful they make a lot of money I don't begrudge anybody their businesses go be successful I am proud of you all we won't do it because we are so protective of the journalism that we make and I I worry honestly that the audience doesn't care anymore.
Yeah we're just like whatever the audience is it just assumes that we're bought and paid for left and right and I'm like no I think they do I think they do and I think they know like the thing I just said no to it was because they wanted me to.
It was a food product and they wanted me to be like a person who knows about the world being like this is good for you and I was like that's not my job that's not who I am I don't know anything about whether this is good for you or not and like also it's not like it's not just food is food I like that's not the business that we need to be I'm convincing people that like one snack food is better than another just eat the Doritos everybody it's snacks.
I was so it's really interesting like that to me like what are those brands want they want people to advocate for them and they can buy it at scale on a lot of platforms for wild amounts of money and they can't buy it from us and the fact that we are not for sale I think is I can I'm pretty sure this is about thing the fact that we are not for sale is increasingly in an
mechanism. I think it's our competitive advantage right because I get to yell loudly we're not for sale but it is increasingly in an mechanism. Do you get affiliate fees for like reviews. Yeah so we have a commerce operation that's sort of over there and so we review things that is all of some thing makes us more money and affiliate sales our viewers are not incentivized by that they barely know it the one place where it gets a little
muddy and I hope people understand why this is muddy is deals coverage like our audience wants to know is this a good deal like here are some deals that are happening are they good deals and then we have to evaluate that and so at the person you want to value that is closer to the not you want objective judgment of like is this a good deal but then you get affiliate fees on that that's where I think it gets the
muddiest but overall we try to stay as precious and unscathed by the commercial aspect of our business as we can. Yeah untainted does the money the version expenny we've been around for for over a decade or last website on earth do you think about that a lot do you have conversations a lot about like the the PNL and etc. We do I
think in my roles that energy is incumbent on me to make sure that one we are we have an audience like the audience is happy with us we're invested in places where we think audiences growing or there's impact and that we are growing
up and so we don't know if it's going to be the same but we have to be aware of that. So I have a publisher and I was Helen Halen have a Helen used to be our engagement editor and then she was our editorial director so she was my number one deputy and I would like go off into the company and have meetings and then I would come back and ask how I want to do and then I would just go do whatever I said and eventually I was like this is stupid you should just be my boss so how is
it going to be a lot of money and I have worked together for years upon years so three of us spend a lot of time just thinking about our business and like where we're investing in how works but the split is that I'm in charge of editorial and creative and Helen is in charge of our business. It's a website that makes money. Amazing.
Yeah I think fundamentally like the idea that we have a website that makes money is weird like it is revolutionary but also I will be operating inside of a company called Vox Media that also makes money and like is also in the turmoil of the digital media business but overall compared to sort of its peers has managed to weather the storm and a huge part of that is the company is founded on community and has founded on products like building web products and that is resilient.
So you are a busy guy you what do you do you host several podcasts you just want to knew a second verge or second decoder second episode of decoder yeah yeah so you've got that going on you got a lot of people to manage your dad you got many many things I have a classic decoder question but in two parts for you how do you make decisions at the verge but also how do you make
decisions at Neely Patel. I really workshopped this this answer in the answer is panic. I used that too that's one of my favorite ways. I am optimizer on speed that fundamentally the crisper you are in making a decision the faster that decision can be proven to be and then you know a lot so you get to remake the decision there's one thing that makes that different for me than I think other people not
concentrops there's a bunch of decisions we make as an organization every single day minute to minute that don't get to be unmade we publish a new story and it's wrong we don't get to unmake that decision we have to issue a correction and put it
at the bottom of the story we write a headline it's really not great for us to write and rewrite headlines so there's a bunch of instinct and taste and hard fought experience just about sort of making the product we make every day that we still have to do it
really fast right the core value of a newsroom especially news on my cars is speed so we still have to win every day all the time we have to be fast but next to that and I just want to bracket that set of like editorial decision making because that is a group product like a lot of us make those decisions altogether all the time and we are very aware of the stakes of getting out of the problem but then there's like everything else like should we spend money and going on on this
thing it's like yeah we should go let's like see what happens like get a story out of it how many how many podcasts am I going to do today like like it's there's only so many I can do you know you got to be in a lot of meetings but you also got to be in a lot of podcasts which are like meetings but hopefully more fun I wish more of my meetings are podcasts like everyone like desperately trying to be a little bit more
entertaining than they usually are yeah it would be great I actually am really bad at context switching so a big part of my decision making process is to stack up like modes of operation so I'll be in meeting mode for four hours I need an hour basically to like turn that off and go into individual contributor podcast host mode and so I really try to make like for lack of a better word like talent moments where it's I have to be on and performing for an audience and then
manager moments where I have to like you navigate meeting world and like make a bunch of decisions and like evaluate trade offs like all of that is a different part of my brain and I try to not switch between those modes very often I try to stay really focused but fundamentally when you ask me like how I make decisions it's usually I know the stakes of any decision that we're making because we've been running the verge for a very long time and the people around me know the stakes of most of our
decisions and then it's can we make the decision quickly and importantly can that decision stay made because it's we can make a decision and then it has like bounce somewhere else and someone else has to like think about it and that's when a decision gets unmade and that's when the chaos that's in oh yeah absolutely but I have when you're figuring out how to prioritize your own time when somebody says it'd be better for the verge if decoder had a second episode a week how do you say yeah that
that one yes is worth more of my time being spent on this but not some other of the many other cool things you could be doing that that would generate revenue and also be exciting for you yeah the second episode of decoder it's weird when you do a podcast podcast are forever projects they don't end unless you are telling a tidy story right you just just make one a week for the rest of your life like you do yeah yeah it's like they're just forever projects so I have always
with decoder in the back of my head had one end state which is we should do enough of these and ask the same questions enough times so that we can do a book right and then we can like put together a book that's like helpful that it's full of space about how companies work and our decisions are made it's print again and then we and then like that that would be like a useful artifact of the time we all spent making the show we kind of got to a place where we're starting to talk
about that we're going to do anything with it but we we're able to at least talk about it which is fascinating and then we're like oh there's more decoder we can make now that we've achieved the goal of like the show exists it has a format there are some questions we ask people people want to be on the show when you start a new podcast you have to basically beg people to be on it now we have a lot of incoming which is really useful and good and I hope it continues although I still
there's still people we want to go get so we still go ask but the first version of decoder sort of running itself and then it's like oh but there's other stuff we want to talk about that does not lend itself to an hour long interview with the CEO there's lots of stuff that is happening in this world that we can talk about and explain that it's hard it's actually hard to find it not self interested CEO to talk about like AI and copyright law
I can go talk to a lot of CEOs they're all self interested we actually want to take a step back you know people understand it. Talk to Robert Kinslet about it I'm sure I'll have a really diverse new one. Yeah I'm sure Sam Alton has a strong point of view on whether AI and copyright law are compatible.
Yeah we just like are the stories we want to do are a little more expansive than this box we can do a shorter one we can figure out how to make that efficient and that will actually let us put more verge reporters on the show let us put more friends the show on the show and it let us when we do our audience surveys the audience is like we like it when you know I explain things like actual feedback we get so let us deliver some more with the audience
once and that is to me a good use of my time because it serves my team it lets my team come address the audience in the show it serves the audience the most useful advice have ever been given about time management was from Sachin dollars he of Microsoft I was in the back of a car with him one time we're going from one thing to another and he was timing about like all the things he'd done that day like he'd gone for a run
he went to an investor meeting we are doing this interview he's going to open a story it was going to have it and I was like what how do you do all these things and he looked at me very seriously and he said it's your time you have to be selfish about it and I was like oh shit like the master of the universe just like told me to do a better time management and I've hold on I hold on to that like very dearly like you can only do
the things you only have so much time you can only do the things you really want to do and all the other stuff is kind of noisy and if it's important I will come back around we got to take a quick break we'll be back to discuss the big shifts Neely is seeing on the web the
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that's pro dot fiber fi v er r dot com and use code Vox we're back talking with the verge editor in chief me a lot of the state of the web and whether I should go all in on the fedaverse it definitely feels like this is a time when everything is is a big mess so we've got sudden layoffs at all kinds of newspapers Google seems to be worse than it used to be AI is maybe going to take over from search someday YouTube isn't a head jam on anymore Twitter Twitter the fedaverse might happen
I think it's like exciting do you think that all of this like space is going to create like new sunlight reaching ground and like new things will happen and what do you think those new things might be I do what I worry about is that there's not a ton of random money sitting around
like there were at certain times yeah there have been in other times the you know that but yeah let me make the case for the green shoots we were founded in a particular moment where two things there was a confluence of two things one you might remember the millennial media moment was big
millennials killed things left and right showed up the enter the workforce I'm like on the tail end of gen X I myself think of myself as gen X but yeah one year younger than the year of one you're sorry I think we're exactly the same age yeah yeah but you remember that millennials
are killing everything like all the gardens burned to the ground across America like nothing was lost because their habits were different it was huge generational shift new people were entering the workforce they were young they were going to do something different than their parents were going to do and you can see okay a bunch of money is moving because these people have different tastes at the same time that was when the mobile phone had arrived the smart phone
had arrived you're in the first flush of like the LTE era of the internet basically and so you have a new audience with new habits in a new distribution format right and that distribution format really looked like social networks and you just saw a bunch of media companies spring up to meet that
moment and a bunch of other companies spring up to meet that moment and so the idea that you have an audience shift in a technology shift is very powerful I think we see that again right now like very clearly I see that right now
you have a Gen Z audience you have a millennia audience that is in a Gen X audience and a boomer audience is pretty sick of the internet as it is today like they're over it like these platforms to borrow the phrase from Cory doctoro is being insidified like left and right people are looking for
something else and then you have Gen Z which is actually another new generation has habits yet to form and then you I think you do see some of these technology shifts elsewhere I do think you see some of the action around the Fed reverse and decentralized social networks and the collapse of Twitter and there's just opportunity to build new kinds of products for audiences that are looking for something new or haven't yet formed their habits and that is just a
very powerful moment that reminds me of the moment that we were founded it now is there a bunch of VC money floating around to make that bet again yeah maybe there's sunlight but there's no fertilizer yeah and to be fair the VC money that started the BuzzFeeds and the other it's not a great return
it's not like it was a great bet like we didn't we didn't create a bunch of lasting millennial media institutions we might have created but one or two and I might accidentally run one of them and that's weird like I don't think that should be the case right like that should not that's not right yeah I think you're better a strategy than you think you are or than you're willing to take credit for like we are just stubborn about being about one thing right that that is
our only secret we care a lot we work really hard that's those are basics but then we have been very stubborn that like the verge has a has an identity and we're not going to like get moved off the ball too much it's the same forever
youtubers great the algorithm comes and goes and buffets people in different directions but the ones who've had lasting success on any platform are the ones who are pretty true to themselves and that I think is just a universal media lesson does the verge have an AI policy I'm the only person I know
who has published AI written copy on the website oh everyone refuses to be outraged about it this thing should go viral because the editor achieved the verge published a post half written by AI and if I could just get the outrage viral traffic we'd be doing the next episode of this on a boat
Hank get mad yeah it's a I wrote I wrote a article that said I've ever introduced by a brother wazer printer and then to try to gain Google I let chat GPT like fill out the back half of the thing with like filler text Google was not very happy about it we did sell a lot of printers
that's a true interest commerce team told me we moved a bunch of printers that day wow briefly ranked very highly Google they were equally not happy that but yeah we don't wear a mess this is a mess man like the web is in trouble it's real bad if we got to have fun you got to have fun while it
burns down so that was my fun it was an art project of a printer post it cost 50 cents to fill the entire web up with crap yeah the entire web will be filled with crap like I am glad I'm not Google right now they seem to mess but yeah so that's the only AI copy that's been on our site
so far I think our policy straight forwardly is we don't lie to people yeah I'm not saying we're never I'm we actually because of the phones you reviewed and things you're done we certainly now published photos that have been edited by AI just to show people like we're this photo editor by
yeah yeah I'm sure over time there will be more elements of that stuff but our policy very succinctly is like do not lie to people so yeah if you're doing something tell that people that you're doing yeah and I think our audience wants us to push the boundary and just like just showing what the
tools can do but we are very you know we're very precious we're going to disclose everything and like largely what we sell here as people like this is where the people are and we're going to stay pretty focused on that so the Fediverse excites me because I don't understand it I understand the
technology idea that like my posts can be seen on different platforms because they're all part of a standard protocol and that like my follow or graph can follow me and like my bio can populate on other places but I don't know what it means like I don't know what gets created in that space and
I don't think anybody does I think like if you change social media in this way what happens a lot of people seem to be like if you change it in this way things will get better but I also remember feeling that way about everything so far that like you know I remember back when you know like
Twitter was going to save the world and like social media was going to bring us all together can you convince me that the Fediverse will be better if it actually happens I can try I don't know that I can make the case that it will be a hundred percent better I can make well no yeah one
percent better I can make a one percent better case not I got that one's easy I got one percent so the real answer is between one and a hundred but I can do one so you know there's this phrase that people in media who think about media like say all the time content is king right everyone like
yeah like people like pop out a dark corner to say this to you if you ever hate the content is in case someone's like no content is king and it's just this like mantra like people just say it like people the audience will go wherever the content is no matter what and you kind of take one step back
and you're like well distribution is really important and in fact the lesson of the internet is that the distribution has an outsize impact on what content gets made yeah and discovery like I don't really know the difference between discovery and distribution but I
think like they may now be the same thing oh yeah I completely agree so the YouTube algorithm wants something and youtubers deliver that to the algorithm I'll give you another example that I think about all the time I love the band new order the 12 inch single when they made it possible to make
vinyl records that were 12 inches with one song on them new order was like here's blue Monday we made it for you it's very long because they just the distribution medium like the format literally allowed them to make that song YouTube is like that all these platforms are like that in some way
YouTube depending on how you think about it to get a second pre-roll slot on a YouTube video it has to be so long and YouTube will be like no that's not how works but like every youtuber is like yeah it has to be so like and there's a push and pull between what the platform says about itself and what the people who create for the platform suddenly all my videos are going to be eight minutes long right and in YouTube will probably listen to this until one of us that
that's not right but it's like youtubers like yeah that's eight minutes long like yeah there's a there's a number and it gets what it wants in that recommendation algorithm is the distribution for people for a look and they push things into boxes and that means I think the content isn't
king on the internet like the distribution actually just creates the work or creates the pressures that forces all the work to be the same and I think over time that's what drives the audience is away right so that there's a real change in how these platforms work where over time they just become
more and more the same thing and the creators become more and more the same and that's a little exhausting in every place where you see open distribution you see a huge variety of creators and content podcasts have basically open distribution like RSS feeds podcast distributor RSS feeds
that means people kind of own their distribution there's a vast array of podcast creators there's a vast array of podcast formats they don't all sound like the beginning of YouTube videos or whatever I hate to keep picking on
YouTube it just you can pick any algorithmic platform and it's the same like TikTokers are more the same than different right podcasters are more different than the same the web is distributed largely you know by through websites and through RSS there's a huge variety of websites and way
websites look but then you see the algorithmic search pressure push web design kind of all into the same box newsletters distributed by email open distribution the newsletter economy is full of a huge variety of creators doing
a huge variety of things they're more different than the same so all I see with the Fediverse is oh this is going to open social distribution up a little bit it's going to allow us to control our distribution networks it's going to say I'm not on Twitter but people on Twitter can follow my
website and I can go promote that follow anywhere I want in different ways and build an audience outside of the pressures of the algorithm to me just that that ability to try is one percent better that's exciting actually should I be a Fediverse person should I be on the Fediverse somehow
what and what would what should I do there I think you spoke at it okay I think you should start a I'm asked an account and you can follow a pixel Fed account on it and you're like that's weird I followed this account from the service that looks
like Instagram it's like a driverless card it's like a card is driving it so without a person in the face weird it's strange yeah and they're like well how would I reshape society around this you're like I don't know many many questions to be answered along the way but
just that first action like I am on a website that looks like Instagram and I can follow a creator that posts something that looks like tweets on this thing and I can open yet another app and log into both of them and it will just like show me everything it is mind expanding in one particular kind of way because the commercial internet has never allowed you to do these things Blue Sky which is a different kind of decentralized service they just opened up
anybody can go sign up for it now that their own decentralization protocol called the AT protocol their idea is that there should be a marketplace for algorithms that you can show up you can look at the firehose of content you can say I'm going to buy an algorithm
that shows me only posts about Santa Claus and it's going to do it's going to go do the work for you that's a huge idea that is completely unproven but it's more exciting than okay here's another billionaire who's going to Pratt a lot of free speech
and then eventually like betray you if you're me and you run a big website and you are thinking like how can I redistribute this website like how can I reach people more directly my brain is like lit up like you should be able to follow me at the verge.com and see all my quick posts in your threads account when threads federates that's a big deal like a really big deal especially if we can find ways to monetize that in a way that feels good that's a really big deal how would you monetize it
we got to invent some stuff I have a very enlightened CEO Jim back off and he's allowing me to poke it some ideas about those things like what does new distribution look like in the Fediverse and then you know our company has like a giant sports property and you know
it hasn't left yet is sports Twitter so I'm going to poke at it with the verge and we're like lightly exploring it but I think there's opportunity there to build new kinds of media products that is like really exciting and like you just have to do the first thing
which is you have to just be on one server and follow someone on another server and be like oh that worked and then your brain starts exploding but my brain hasn't exploded with a monetization idea yet I'm very curious about that so I'll just watch you do what I guess
the thing is the dollars are leaving Twitter right there's just a pool of money that used to be getting spent on Twitter that who knows where it's going to go and if you can just make it kind of like easier and safer and less Nazi filled to spend money in our website
maybe there's something there we have to actually build it you know we did one test of you know we have QuickPost we did one test where we sold the QuickPost as an ad it was very manual they sold the tapble which is really cool and like neat you know and the apple did an experiment
they bought a new kind of ad with us great that's not my side house but it was a test and everybody liked it right like our audience was like oh this is a better ad than the other kind yeah it's like oh we invented a new ad thing that like feels good in this place
you know like oh there's you can just like put some pieces together and be like oh this makes sense to me and I'd rather be in the sort of like market competition side of things than like the spin the wheel of what billionaire do you trust today in my history of making stuff on the internet
it has seemed like every time a company has said hello we'd like you to make fewer decisions and we will make the decisions for you the people say yes give me that and I don't like this but I wonder if we will look back and think like ah that was a weird moment in history
or if this is like a path that we are on and we will just keep on heading down it until no one ever makes any content decisions at all except for whether I mean TikTok is almost already all the way like this except for whether to keep watching and all that so the only data that the
platform needs to continue to serve you things that will keep you infinitely satiated one very tight saying that I repeat a lot is that data can only tell you about the past it is a perfect window into the past it is an absolutely useless view into the future
maybe it will help you make make a smarter bet but it will not tell you what is going to happen in the future especially when it comes to people on the internet like it just won't and especially when it comes to art and creativity it absolutely is useless in that case
like the the famous William Goldman saying is the secret truth of how I would is like no one knows what they're doing it's true there's a reason it's a saying there's a reason it's a cliche I'm not sure if that's 100% the saying but it's close enough
no one knows what they're doing so I don't know who I'm doing I think the idea that you can like algorithmically perfect a feed by just looking at all the data will actually drive people to an intense amount of boredom and we'll just go try something else I also think young people reflexively
into their great credit just reject everything their parents did they just throw it out the window and then they do it again 10 years later and pretend they invented it which is great and I think a very important cycle of creativity but I think that danger is overblown because it
requires a level of mathematical certainty that is not reflected anywhere in reality okay with that in mind I want to read you something that you said on threats oh no which is amazing it's no it's good it's you are confirming yourself
the reason we're mourning these magazines this is about sports illustrated being shut down is because the media that has replaced them is cloud chasing out of the algorithmic garbage not anything that has aspirations of being bigger than whatever metrics a platform gives them
of course there is a new sports illustrated it's bar stool sports it is weightless and empty and the best case scenario for a media company built to succeed on platforms first we got damn boy that's what it's like call the burn unit second though
this is this is going to maybe feel like it comes out of left field you're talking about moving like let's have websites let's have distributed let's not have platforms this feels a little bit like one step away from saying maybe print has a future and maybe like
do you think print could be something new again maybe we're going to company that runs a legendary print magazine in the Eric magazine we've published a Verge stories in collaboration with New York and had them on the cover of that magazine and boy does that make everybody excited
boy is that just the coolest feeling in the world and you know yeah it is not a normal media company where the weirdo tech website gets to go talk to the legendary print magazine and say hey do you want to work together on a big story and by the way we'd love to put it on the cover and the legendary print magazine is like dope like let's run and so all of my credit to David Ascle and the people in New York who are like open to this idea like that is not
that is impossibility almost everywhere else even for two print magazines to collaborate like that for us to do it is amazing and like I love the company I work at but it's really cool when it happens it's the coolest when it happens
and I do think there's some amount of people would like to buy atoms not just bits you know and the atoms are really meaningful to them so I don't know what kind of future that is I don't know that we're going to do a print magazine anytime soon but like what does that represent?
It represents well somebody cared enough to print this picture and like mail a piece of paper to everybody around and the care is really validating for the people to get to be in a cover or whatever and that validation is really important in that thread post though what I was getting at is... No I know it just made me think about it Yeah it made me think about it but yeah go hit me What I was getting at there is sports illustrated its aspiration was to be a chronicle of culture It was to was...
Not anymore but was right like the great magazines the great print magazines the great media brands they had aspirations that were bigger than their revenue that were bigger than their view counts it was did we make an impact did we move the culture is this the thing everybody is talking about is this the magazine cover that maybe it sold the most to the new stands but it was the most striking and evocative I judge the Asmi Awards the National Magazine Awards
and you know the people in those rooms they still talk about impact they still talk about what makes a great magazine that's like an art form that is discussed and that's inspiring I really care about like packaging and design and all this stuff Barcel sports whatever you want to think about Barcel sports is it has an editorial point of view it absolutely does it has a main character every single day absolutely does but it is defined by its metrics its aspiration is to have the most views
its aspiration is an organization is to get the most traffic and they think that way and you can see it comes through in the work they make and it's designed to be so big that it overcomes the view count and I think that's empty I think that's why people are sad that something that sports illustrator that used to stand for all that stuff is in decline and it feels like there's no replacement there should be a replacement
media brands should die over time there should be new ones I think that's a healthy cycle but all the new ones are either individual creators getting burned out by the dozen or they are media brands that are designed mostly to be optimized for platform distribution and never stand for anything much bigger that effort and that care is actually what ends up differentiating you in a sort of non-commoditized market and the platforms are at commoditization
and that maybe that is more so the tension than individuals versus brands but when you have a brand you try to differentiate and our company at least in its history is try to differentiate on quality and that's what makes it more expensive yep
we're going to be fine we're going to save the media with blog posts you're going to save the media with blog posts with the last website on and keep saying weird things and putting them on stickers that I could put on them those stickers have ended up on some very powerful laptops which is very fun
well I'm very impressed by what y'all are doing at the verge and I'm honored frankly that you gave me the opportunity to be a one-time host so that you could be interviewed I'm very worried that one of the fired by the way I want to be very clear the chances of me being fired are very high
and this might be the last thing I would do all right well in that case it'll go down in history yeah you want to raise the stakes right at the end of the podcast me live a tell thank you for being on decoder thank you for agreeing to this ridicule study I appreciate it I'd like to thank Neal I for taking the time to speak with me and for letting me take the reins of decoder for a moment and thank you for tuning in I hope you enjoyed it and it wasn't too weird it was a lot of fun for me
if you're looking for more of what I'm up to you can find me by searching Hank Green on the internet I'm on threads fairly actively at Hank Green also apparently all of the verge people are there now and a bunch of tech reporters and that's mostly why I'm there so if meta wants to thank anyone they're the ones making it happen over there as far as I'm concerned my youtube channel that I had with my brother is it blog breathers on youtube we have a podcast called Dear Hank and John
and if you want to hear my science trivia game show podcast that's called SciShow Tangent you can listen to that wherever there are podcasts if you have big ideas on what the decoder team should cover or who they should have on the show they would love your feedback you can email them at decoder at the verge.com they really do read every email or you can hit up Neal I on threads he's at reckless 1280 they also have a tick-tock you can check it out at decoder pod
if you like decoder please share this with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you really love this show give that five star review I give it a five star review maybe I didn't yet let's do it right now you and me let's pop open that app and give it a five star review
are you doing it I'm doing it right now here goes open and click on those three little dots on Spotify and click on a rate show and there I'm doing it five stars five stars for decoder decoder is a production of the verge and is part of the box media podcast network today's episode is produced by Kate Cox and Nick stat and was edited by Callie Wright thank you to all of them for helping me through the process the decoder music of course by break master cylinder see you next time